BUCHANAN, Ga. — Brandon Heath, Haralson County’s chief magistrate judge, flies the Confederate battle flag on his property. A version of it adorns the front bumper of his cherry-red Chevrolet pickup. It is painted on the wall of the gymnasium of his alma mater, Haralson County High School, where the sports teams are called the Rebels and Rebelettes.

Like a number of people in this rural, working-class county — which is 92 percent white and just beyond the creep of Atlanta’s western suburbs — Mr. Heath believes that efforts to remove the flag from public spaces across the South are “plumb ridiculous.” And he insists that his reverence for the banner has nothing to do with race.

“It’s just about where we come from, and locally here, we’re just real proud of that,” said Mr. Heath, 35, an auctioneer who, when not in court, favors camouflage ball caps and speaks with an unhurried country twang. “It’s all about your school, and your upraising, and who you are.”

Support for the Confederate flag may be waning among Southern lawmakers in the aftermath of the church shootings in Charleston, S.C. But here in this county of 29,000 people, as in many other stretches of the white, working-class South, the flag remains a revered symbol, not only of the Confederate dead, but of a unique regional identity.

In Haralson County, a ragged patch of low hills and homesteads at the southern tip of Appalachia, it can seem like the battle flag is baked into the culture. One finds it displayed on the welcome sign in Buchanan, the county seat, as part of the seal of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, alongside that of the Lions Club.

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At the Georgia Peach Oyster Bar, President Obama’s campaign poster, altered to say “Nope,” combined with a Confederate flag.CreditKevin Liles for The New York Times

And while support for the flag is widespread here, its supporters, and their justifications, vary drastically: There are overt racists and avowed antiracists; students of history and those who seem oblivious to it; ardent defenders of the Lost Cause and others who do not understand why the blue-spangled X on a red field — as ubiquitous here as deer stands, church steeples and biscuits with gravy — can be so controversial.

“I just don’t get why people are getting all mad about it,” said Corey Doyle, 19.

Mr. Doyle, who was recently hired as a car salesman, was standing the other day with five other white protesters on a grassy berm outside the local Walmart, whose corporate office decided to pull Confederate merchandise from its shelves after the Charleston massacre.

The protesters waved the battle flag and an old version of the Georgia state flag. That state flag, which prominently incorporated the battle flag’s design, was introduced in 1956 by an arch-segregationist state Legislature as courts were ordering the South to integrate. It was replaced in 2001 by lawmakers more sensitive to Georgia’s image to outsiders.

Passing cars and trucks honked in solidarity as they turned into the parking lot.

Earnest Fryer, 28, an ice cream truck driver, was waving the old state flag. Asked about its segregationist origins, he drew a blank. To him, it was the flag that his father had given him, and one that had long adorned the wall of his room, he said. Like Mr. Heath and Mr. Doyle, Mr. Fryer insisted that his stand on the flag had nothing to do with matters of race.

“We don’t want to offend nobody,” Mr. Fryer said, noting that he was part Cherokee. Later, he said slavery was the “one thing that makes all the rest of my heritage look bad.”

“But there’s a lot more about us than that one thing,” he added.

And yet that one thing still looms disturbingly large.

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H. Allen Poole has twice been re-elected to the Board of Commissioners of Haralson County, Ga. He supports leaving the flag up.CreditKevin Liles for The New York Times

At Kimball’s General Store, a popular meeting place here, a man who declined to give his name blamed blacks for the new assault on the flag, and muttered a racial slur. Near Mr. Heath’s office at the county courthouse, a pickup parked beside a weatherworn house sported a pair of Confederate flags, and a window sticker that read “American Nazi Party.”

Just across the county line, the Georgia Peach Oyster Bar has operated as a scandalous open secret. Its website features two Confederate battle flags, the description, “The Original Klan, Klam & Oyster Bar,” and a stunningly virulent collection of racist signs. Patrons are confronted with a selection of crude cartoons and graffiti, and a menu that declares, on the appetizer page, “We cater to hangins’.”

Mr. Heath acknowledged the existence of such sentiments here. But he also noted that this overwhelmingly white place, so committed to the flag, also elected a black man, H. Allen Poole, as the chairman of its Board of Commissioners in 2004, and has re-elected him twice. Last year, voters elected the state’s first Asian-American Superior Court judge, Meng Lim, a Cambodian refugee who grew up in the Haralson County city of Bremen.

“It’s complicated,” Mr. Heath said.

For Mr. Heath, the flag helped get him elected in 2008, when he bounced around the county’s rural back roads in his pickup, hunting for votes. The battle flag was affixed to the front bumper. A 12-gauge shotgun was in the gun rack, and an old bloodhound was in the back.

It was all part of a package that validated Mr. Heath’s regular-guy credentials and bolstered his argument that the magistrate court would be better run by a self-proclaimed good old boy with a high school diploma than by the lawyer who was the incumbent at the time.

Mr. Heath saw it as an appeal to a common culture, not a racial gesture, a way to show voters that he was one of them: conservative, Republican (the county went 81 percent for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election) and, as he said, “salt of the earth.”

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At Haralson County High School, where the sports teams are called the Rebels and Rebelettes, students once voted by a wide margin to repaint the battle flag at the gym when it was defaced.CreditKevin Liles for The New York Times

On a recent weekday morning, Mr. Heath gave a brief tour of Haralson County, starting with Hutcheson’s Memorial Chapel and Crematory, where he introduced the owner, Danny Hutcheson, the county coroner.

Mr. Hutcheson sat in a back room that was decorated with political and historical memorabilia, including a picture of an ancestor who, according to family legend, was robbed of his cattle by Yankee soldiers during the Civil War.

He says he does not display the flag for fear of upsetting his black friends and clients. But he defends those who do.

“We’ve got a cross in our church,” Mr. Hutcheson said. “The Ku Klux Klan burns crosses in people’s yards. Does that mean we should take the crosses out of our churches?”

Mr. Heath drove on to the high school where the trophy room of the gym features the battle flag painted on the wall.

Such displays have caused trouble here in the past. In September 2000, someone painted over a flag at the gym, and students were allowed to vote on whether to repaint it. Repainting won by a vote to 861 to 150, according to news reports at the time. A group of black football players threatened to boycott a game, but that never materialized. It all seemed perplexing to Cain Jackson, a 22-year-old graduate, who is white.

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A reproduction of the old Georgia flag, which incorporates the Confederate battle flag, on Mr. Heath's truck. “It’s just about where we come from, and locally here, we’re just real proud of that,” he said.CreditKevin Liles for The New York Times

“I don’t see how it’s racist to anybody,” he said.

Later, Mr. Heath paid a visit to Mr. Poole, the chairman of the county commission.

Mr. Poole, a Republican, said Southern governors were wrong to take the battle flag down. He noted that he, too, had graduated from Haralson County High School in 1974, and had played safety and outside linebacker on the football team.

“I was a Rebel,” he said, “for four years.”

But not everyone is so comfortable. Angelica Griffin is also an African-American, and also played sports at the high school. She said she was “terrified” to criticize the flag while she was there.

Ms. Griffin, 28, recently completed law school at DePaul University in Chicago and is studying for the bar exam. After the Charleston shootings, she said, she posted her displeasure with the flag on social media, sparking debate and pushback from white friends back home.

“People were so apt to defend it, without even thinking about other people and how that flag makes them feel,” she said.

But Ms. Griffin also spoke about the time, in 2008, when her mother lost her job. White Haralson County neighbors showered her mother with money and gift cards so she could afford to drop her off at college.

“You know what? It doesn’t make sense,” Ms. Griffin said. “It’s the great conundrum of the South.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Complicated’ Support for Flag in White South. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe